Exposure of a patient to X-rays produces two types of effects:—stochastic, long-term effects (cancer risk) are related to the dose accumulated by patients throughout their lifetime, from this perspective, any radiation dose must be weighed against the benefit for the patient, and short-term effects over the hours, days and weeks following after exposure (burns), these are related to short-time exposure at very high dose.
Yet, radiation imaging can expose a patient's body or some parts thereof to radiation doses which may vary substantially from one acquisition to another, particularly in relation to the chosen directions of exposure.
Also, radiation and notably X-rays interact very differently with the bones or tissues of the human body, preventing easy understanding of the level of radiation to which a given part of the body can still be exposed.
There is therefore a need for the monitoring of radiation doses received by a body or by different parts thereof during an examination involving one or more acquisitions of radiological images.
It is also desired, when acquiring new images, to avoid accumulating too excessive radiation doses in some body regions or in some organs, and hence to be able to determine the acquisition conditions for subsequent images allowing optimization of the radiation doses accumulated in a body.
Methods are known to estimate the distribution of radiation doses accumulated in a patient's body.
However, with these methods it is not possible to determine how the position of the X-ray source can be modified to prevent too strong exposure of a body region.